SOURCE: Eko, Ebele. “Beyond the Myth of Confrontation: A Comparative Study of African and African-American Female Protagonists.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 17, no. 4 (October 1986): 139-52.

In the following essay, Eko examines how Aidoo subverts the traditional role of the African female protagonist in Anowa, comparing the play to several works from African and African American authors.

Times have changed since the sixties, and a new breed of black women writers in Africa and America are giving creative birth to a new breed of female protagonists. One of their deep concerns, a point which Hoyt Fuller has stressed,1 is to help destroy degrading images and myths and recreate for black women images that liberate and build up self-identity. The myth of black mother-daughter confrontation, to which a whole volume of a scholarly journal has been devoted,2 is one such.